Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Trump’s new conservative Christian lawyer Jay Sekulow is just another right-wing grifter

"Sekulow also serves as president of the Georgia-based nonprofit Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, or CASE, which raised more than $52 million in 2015, according to IRS records. Four of Sekulow’s family members — including his wife, Pam, and Gary Sekulow — serve as the board of directors for CASE, which transferred nearly $16 million to ACLJ and paid almost $1.2 million to businesses owned by Jay Sekulow. An analysis by The Tennesseean newspaper found ACLJ and CASE had paid out more than $33 million between 1998 and 2011 to members of Sekulow’s family or to businesses they own. Sekulow boasts that he’s taken no salary from ACLJ since 2002, but he has outsourced his own legal services to the group and became a private contractor. That role requires no public disclosure of his salary, which he told the Legal Times was “above $600,000 a year.” “Through the ACLJ and a string of interconnected nonprofit and for-profit entities, (Sekulow) has built a financial empire that generates millions of dollars a year and supports a lavish lifestyle — complete with multiple homes, chauffeur-driven cars, and a private jet that he once used to ferry Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia,” reported Legal Times. Former employees complained that Sekulow told them they were doing God’s work, while jetting off at donor expense — on private jets owned by his family — to play golf."